In reply to Enty: My bookcase is full of kindles, just don't get time to read that much ;-)

I read something the other week about a 'kindle' that costs 10 quid. It takes AAA batteries to keep costs down and you buy books via your smart phone and bluetooth them to the reader, again to save wifi hardware costs. Interesting huh

> (In reply to Enty)
>
> Out of curiosity I Googled "Kindle BBC Watchdog" and found a link to a thread on an Amazon forum, only to click on it and get "We're sorry, this discussion has been removed."
>
> Only a matter of time before "We're sorry, Enty has been removed".

Yep. They said on watchdog that Amazon refused to answer their last question.
They got a scientist on it and apparently static electricity locks the screen - I've had two lock up on me. They want 50 quid to replace the last one but I haven't had 12 months use from either of them.

It's quite usual for items replaced under warranty to only have the remainder of the warranty for the replacement. Reducing this to a max of 3 months is a bit wrong.

However, most of the time the warranty is irrelevant - you have a lot more rights under sale of goods but it's a struggle to get them recognized.

My kindle has a crack in the plastic next to the screen, it's clearly a design flaw, many similar examples but as it's only a few mm and not affecting anything I haven't complained. They replaced the faulty non-lit cover in an instant when I had the crashing fault, I got a voucher for the lit case straight away.

In reply to Enty: worth also remembering you are buying a licence to read the books - you do not own them and if you are put on the naughty step by amazon they take them all away without explanation or recourse.

>
> By the way. When they replace your broken Kindle you get a reconditioned one WTF???
>
> E

If they all work so brilliantly, how come they've so many to recondition!

The Amazon bloke who I complained to said that he had only ever heard of a single case in which 3 Kindles had broken for the same owner.

I was asking for a refund rather than a replacement, the Amazon/Yodel combo just being too insufferable to put myself through again. Inevitably this was too difficult. I should have gone back to retailer etc etc.

Disappointing from Amazon, who I find pretty good in all other ways - dealing in real books in particular!

> (In reply to Enty)
>
> Apple.
>
> They may be overpriced, but they work and if they don't they get replaced.

Oh no they don't! My friend's 13 month old iPod downloaded an official Apple update, which bricked it. Apple said it was a hardware fault that was only revealed by the update, and accepted no responsibility. Their best offer is £50 off a new one. A Google reveals that this is a common problem.
Apologies for taking thread off topic

In reply to Enty:
Tossers indeed. I'm regretting buying one now, even though it's currently still working. What we need with all these things (see my post about Apple above) is for someone with the clout of Watchdog to actually take them to court and enforce the sale of goods act. Once a precedent has been set, these companies will find it harder to avoid their legal responsibilities.

I had a great deal of grief with play.com refusing to adhere to the rules of the Sale of Goods Act for the return of a DVD player. At the time, Play's published T&Cs contradicted the Sale of Goods Act. I contacted the Trading Standards Office local to Play, and only the did Play cooperate.

> (In reply to grumpybearpantsclimbinggoat)
>
> Having read that I'm glad I haven't bothered with an e-reader! Can't see the attraction myself. Who needs to carry 10,000 books around with them anyway?

Positives
You can take one kindle versus loads of books on a long holiday.
You can download books and take them into countries that have a ban on them (not legal but who checks kindles when going through airport security?).

"Disappointing from Amazon, who I find pretty good in all other ways - dealing in real books in particular!"

To bring in a bit of cross-thread, I like them *except* the use of HDNL.

I would pay extra, probably a fair bit extra, for guaranteed use of the Royal Mail instead. Partly because the service is better than any courier I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, and partly because I wish to support them to make their business more viable and help stave off them being flogged to one of said couriers.

I think mine is great. Pretty much everyone in my job (military) has one because its much easier than taking a load of books around with you and we travel a lot and for extended periods. Charge lasts ages and had no dramas with mine yet. Reduced warranty on a replacement seems a bit tight though.

At the risk of opening a can of worms. How long should a sub £100 electronic product be expected to lasy (in the real world, not an ideal world)? At uni we were taught that TV components etc are designed to last for 5 years or so and that is deemed acceptable practice (to the producer not the consumer!)...

Me too, I replaced mine on purchase due to the deliver company giving my first one a good kicking and the replacement has been going strong since three days after the pre-ordered first one arrived. I guess I was lucky.

I do agree about DRM though, it essentially makes us all pay to rent music, video and books for an unspecified amount of time at the sellers discretion. That's why I have spent a grand total of £1.49 on kindle books in the last couple of years - I refuse to pay money for something I'll never own. Same goes for downloading music and video, I'll stick to CD and DVD.

>
>
> At the risk of opening a can of worms. How long should a sub £100 electronic product be expected to lasy (in the real world, not an ideal world)? At uni we were taught that TV components etc are designed to last for 5 years or so and that is deemed acceptable practice (to the producer not the consumer!)...

Last night on Watchdog they had some documentation where Amazon stated 3 years for the Kindle. They spoke to an operator who said you'd be lucky to get 12 months.

> Same goes for downloading music and video, I'll stick to CD and DVD.

Good luck with that in the long run--they won't be around for that much longer!

Like it or not (and I personally hate DRM), digital content downloaded under license is the way forward, and in the future it will become increasingly difficult to obtain books, music, or video in any other way. It's the future and we have to learn to live with it.

I had a Sony reader die this way after 18 months when 1/4 of the screen locked up. And then an Onyx Boox die with the whole screen locking after 30 days or so. Both times there didn't seem to be a reason for them doing what they did as they were sat on a desk but that could explain it.

> in the future it will become increasingly difficult to obtain books, music, or video in any other way. It's the future and we have to learn to live with it.
>
>
>
> Bollocks re:books...

Look around you. Ereading is the only area of the industry experiencing growth. Paper books are going to die out eventually, or at best remain as expensive, lavishly decorated hardbacks. EBooks are better than paperbacks in almost every way and will inevitably replace them.

We have 5 kindles in our family (we like gadgets!) and so far no problems *touch wood*, 3 of them are older than 12 months.

At least the Kindle started off working properly for you. I recently tried to buy a camera and tried 5 of them, and I still didn't find one that worked :-P Now that's an example of something being not fit for purpose!

> (In reply to Clarence)
> [...]
>
> Good luck with that in the long run--they won't be around for that much longer!
>
> Like it or not (and I personally hate DRM), digital content downloaded under license is the way forward, and in the future it will become increasingly difficult to obtain books, music, or video in any other way. It's the future and we have to learn to live with it.

So just to clarify, if your kindle breaks after 2 months, you get a reconditioned replacement with a 3 month warranty, if that breaks after 4 months in total you've had 6 months of kindle and you're out of warranty?

I have a Sony e-reader, coming up to his second birthday. I love it to bits. I don't keep it in a case, I chuck it around, generally treat it poorly I haven't had a problem (other than a some scratches on the metal case, because I just chuck it in bags and pockets without a case). It cost more than a kindle (£125 I think, this was 2 years ago) and to be honest the only reason I went for a Sony over a kindle was because of the use of a proprietary format.

Without breaking the rules once you buy a kindle you can never really buy anything else without losing your collection - any ebooks bought through Amazon are in a proprietary format that can only be read by a kindle or kindle apps. You also can't buy books from anyone other than Amazon - they don't read .epub which is what virtually every other seller uses as well as libraries and the various directories of free books that are out of copyright.

There are some good points to the amazon DRM compared to others (it allows for returning books, lending them to friends etc). If I buy books they invariably have the adobe DRM which requires use of a shitty program which as far as I can tell is incompatible with my computer hardware, it is far easier to then run the book through calibre and strip the DRM (thus breaking the rules). With the Adobe DRM though they can't take my book off me like Amazon can and there have been cases of them taking someone's entire collection of them for breaking some rules (in a similar manner to someone from Waterstones coming into your house and taking all the books you've bought from them off your shelves), this isn't possible with other DRM. However we need to move away from DRM.

It takes me minutes to remove the DRM from something I buy, if I wanted to share it the inclusion of DRM isn't going to make a difference - except to make me more determined to share it because I hate it on principle. In the mean time it also causes lots of problems for the people who don't strip it (and are also not the kind of people who would be sharing it anyway, either because they don't agree with breaking the rules which is why they haven't stripped it, or because they don't have the technical know-how to strip it or ability to google, in which case they also probably don't know how to turn it into a torrent).

I would think an ereader, if looked after well should last 5 years, maybe more like 3 if like me you don't look after it by any stretch of the imagination. Very much sounds like you've got an easy case for it not being fit for the purpose if it's dying after a year.

> (In reply to Enty) My bookcase is full of kindles, just don't get time to read that much ;-)
>
> I read something the other week about a 'kindle' that costs 10 quid. It takes AAA batteries to keep costs down and you buy books via your smart phone and bluetooth them to the reader, again to save wifi hardware costs. Interesting huh

The missus has a Kindle so I thought I'd get one for myself but the £69 price puts me off.

Jumped at the thought of one of these BUT the one thing thats being forgotten here is the reason that you buy and ebook reader..... to read books. Its all well and good to get a cheap even free e-reader if they then recoup the price of the hardware in the costs of the actual e-book.

Can't find a UK store selling Txtr books but comparing the US prices with US Amazon prices shows that most (but not all) cheaper with Amazon. There are also other benefits with the Kindle insofar as you can link a number of 'readers' to an account. That means that you can read a book on your phone/kindle/computer/tablet and have them all sync.

have seen that CEX is doing some good deals on secondhand Kindles..... maybe for christmas!

No personal experience but I've been told that Amazon replaces Kindles free of charge multiple times as long as it hasn't been water/liquid damaged. The screen is quite fragile which was proved when son #1 knocked it off the table onto the stone floor leaving a massive 'crack'. This happened well after the 1 year guarantee had expired. An email to Amazon Customer Service asking about repair was returned with an offer of a free replacement. This came a few days later and the damaged one was returned in the box to a free post address.

> (In reply to alan_davies)
> [...]
>
> Look around you. Ereading is the only area of the industry experiencing growth. Paper books are going to die out eventually, or at best remain as expensive, lavishly decorated hardbacks. EBooks are better than paperbacks in almost every way and will inevitably replace them.

Maybe in high tech countries, but the rest of the world will continue on paper. I would also suggest that EBooks are worse than paper ones in every way and will remain a niche for people that like gadgets. (Oops, bit of an inflammatory comment, sorry.)

All the licensing of electronic content seems a waste of money to me, ever since I bought my first track from itunes and found I could only keep it for 6 itunes licenses. Every time I reset my laptop to factory settings to clear junk is one of them. I only bought two songs from itunes, the other 6000 I have got different ways, but there are no restrictions on what I can do with them, they are mine. I can stream films free online, or download them if I want to keep them, why buy DVD's? Books can be picked up from charity shops, online or from libraries cheaply or for free, I then can do something with the book after, or give it back for someone else. Why pay for an electronic thing that may be superseded in technology in 5 years time and means that all the licenses to read books that you have paid for are therefore redundant?

Also, i think that in an age where we seem to have little room for sentiment, a lot of other people think the humble book is better. Books as a medium have been around just a little longer than cds, dvds etc.. and i don't think they will phase out anywhere near as quickly either. They go hand in hand with a huge part of human history and culture.

Also, they are a bloody good design. Portable (one or two at a time - like someone said, who needs to carry around 10,000 books with them), never need recharging, made from renewable and recyclable resource and with practically infinite options for format/size/style. A strong case for 'if it ain't broke...?'

Of course i see the pros of ereaders, just don't think the world will be 100% converted anytime soon (not in our lifetimes anyway).

Oh, and as mentioned above - you can hand them on without having to fanny about with licensing restrictions or paying a big corporation again.. Two of my most precious books were given to me (one by a climbing mentor, the other by my father).

In reply to alan_davies:
To be honest, my views are not really as clear cut as I have portrayed them to be--I'm simply keen to stimulate what I believe to be a very important debate. I also believe that paper books deserve a place in society, but that place is at risk.

> Paper books are going to die out eventually, or at best remain as expensive, lavishly decorated hardbacks. EBooks are better than paperbacks in almost every way and will inevitably replace them.

What a lot of nonsense.

1. Plenty of people will never convert to ebooks. Paperbacks didn't kill the hardback market.
2. For most people there's not the need to carry more than one or two books at a time. Explain to me the advantage of an ebook in my case?

> (In reply to Enty)
>
> So just to clarify, if your kindle breaks after 2 months, you get a reconditioned replacement with a 3 month warranty, if that breaks after 4 months in total you've had 6 months of kindle and you're out of warranty?
>
>

Not sure how that would work.

I think if it breaks in the first 12 months you get a new one no charge. Hopefully this will take you beyond 12 months. If you break the 2nd one the warranty on it is 3 months.
I was over 15 months (in total) with my second one so the charge is £50 for a reconditioned one.

> (In reply to Jaffacake)
> [...]
>
> Not sure how that would work.
>
> I think if it breaks in the first 12 months you get a new one no charge. Hopefully this will take you beyond 12 months. If you break the 2nd one the warranty on it is 3 months.
> I was over 15 months (in total) with my second one so the charge is £50 for a reconditioned one.
>
> E

That seems a bargain. You can't expect them to give the devices away to anyone careless enough to break two!

Also, when components are designed you aim for a target lifespan of say 5 year, with 95% lasting this long. A few will last longer (particularly those with lower usage than typical) and a few will last less (especially those with higher usage.

If you sell a million devices you'll easily get thousands of early (pre 5 year) fails. Once you factor in that high use people tend to also be the kind of people who frequently update to new devices come out each year and that people don't complain when secondhand devices fail as much as if it was a single owner of the same age, you end up with most people not complaining about fails that occur over 2 -3 years in age.

So you get a spike of people complaining around 12 months and nothing much else, which then starts to look like 12 months is the lifetime of the device with heavy use and everyone else is just months away from failure.

I've used mine most days for 2 years and only have a crack in the plastic which is probably the weak point, but chucking it in and out of bags, lots of travel, reading it in the bath it's had some good use. If it's still working next year I'll probably switch to a newer model and give this one to my wife.

In reply to Enty: any "paper books are dead" people care to join me in sticking £100 a year in a compound interest account for 25 years? If paper books are less than 5% of sales at the end of the period you get the pot, otherwise I will recoup my investment and give the excess to providing books of poetry to a worthy recipient......

> (In reply to Enty) any "paper books are dead" people care to join me

Paper books aren't dead like tape, or videodisc. They're just obsoleted in many areas. The mistake is thinking that eBooks are the total replacment.

Nothing replaces a hard back book or verse with a loving note in the inside cover. Cookbooks are terrible as eBooks, but archives or recipes like BBC Good Food and YouTube videos of cooking techniques are much better. Online encyclopaedias are great for general reference - and I doubt anyone will buy a school age child a set of Britannica anymore - but specific reference books on topics are probably more handy - I can't imagine not having a paper copy of encyclopedia of gardening, but I would rather have an online A to Z of plants (which needs updating more frequently).

> (In reply to Enty)
> [...]
> I think I read recently that amazon had finally admitted that the sales of e-books were subsidising the cost of the Kindle.
>
> Am wondering IF Amazon are looking at peoples buying histories and making a replacement judgement on that?

They said that they sell them at cost. I'm pretty sure this was known from the start as the first UK model was £109 vs £200+ for the Sony version that had a worse screen.

I wouldn't be surprised at the latter. Phone companies do it - why lose money if you don't have to.

The one thing I'm surprised is that if a Kindle is replaced due to their fault you have to have a new one - if you accept a refurb they've tricked you out of some rights. If you get a brand new one and it fails in 6 months they have to prove it was an accident not you have to prove it was a problem from the start.

If you have one fail and it's replaced and then the second fails in 6-12 months, both for the same reason, then you're going to have to try quite hard to show you're not being careless.

> Paper books aren't dead like tape, or videodisc. They're just obsoleted in many areas. The mistake is thinking that eBooks are the total replacment.

I am with you in your sentiment, but it wouldn't surprise me if books go the way of software. 20 years ago, the only way you could get your software to people was to write your software and then manufacture X million disks or CDs, give them to a very expensive logistics firm for distribution and tie up contracts with thousands of stores to sell your product. To offer updates or patches was unheard of simply because it was too expensive to do. Now, anyone can write some software and deliver it to a world market at almost no cost whatsoever. In fact the profit margin on downloaded software is about 99.5%!

With margins like that I can see that it will be publishers and not consumers who push for more eBooks. Yes, there will still be books to buy, but like CDs if they aren't going to be best sellers, forget it. Personally I don't really like the idea of eBooks, but I am a fuddy duddy like that. I can however, regrettably see the writing on the wall for most of the less well selling pulp fiction.

> (In reply to Enty) any "paper books are dead" people care to join me in sticking £100 a year in a compound interest account for 25 years? If paper books are less than 5% of sales at the end of the period you get the pot, otherwise I will recoup my investment and give the excess to providing books of poetry to a worthy recipient......

You're on.

Define "sales", define the rules (i.e. what happens to the money if someone doesn't pay up) and tell me where to send the money. I've no idea who'll be right, but nobody reads paper books in our house and I think it's worth a tenner a month to double my money plus interest on the offchance we're vaguely typical.

> (In reply to grumpybearpantsclimbinggoat)
>
> "Yep, just like the paperless society we live in."
>
> I deal online with almost all of the companies I deal with.
>
> I do not receive any bills by post, except the Council Tax, and that's only because the Council are too backward to e-mail it. It is paid by direct debit.
>
> I decline receipts unless I need them to claim expenses or for warranty purposes (which are submitted to my employer electronically).
>
> I have a shelf full of ageing IT related books which I never refer to, the information is all available on t'interweb at my fingertips.
>
> Not much left, really.
>
> Neil

Same here (apart from the IT books bit - that's just weird) - 12 year old daughter is in her second year of secondary school and hasn't had new exercise books in any subjects yet, because she does everything online. I read a lot both at work and for pleasure and all of it is done on a screen (apart from the occasional copy of "Metro" but that doesn't really count as reading.

>....
>You also can't buy books from anyone other than Amazon - they don't read .epub which is what virtually every other seller uses as well as libraries and the various directories of free books that are out of copyright.

>

Are you sure about that?
I've got books from other sources on my Kindle.
I possibly ran them through an conversion program but it for sure wasn't tricky.

> (In reply to Radioactiveman)
>
> Me too, I replaced mine on purchase due to the deliver company giving my first one a good kicking and the replacement has been going strong since three days after the pre-ordered first one arrived. I guess I was lucky.
>
> I do agree about DRM though, it essentially makes us all pay to rent music, video and books for an unspecified amount of time at the sellers discretion. That's why I have spent a grand total of £1.49 on kindle books in the last couple of years - I refuse to pay money for something I'll never own. Same goes for downloading music and video, I'll stick to CD and DVD.

you may have a problem in a couple of years when DVDs and CDs are no longer mass produced...

In reply to SCC: You're right. There is even a cool little program amazon do called 'send to kindle' that lets you right click files on your PC and send them to your kindle, similar to the email thing but without the hassle of having to attach files, also less of a wait.

> (In reply to Clarence)
> [...]
>
> Good luck with that in the long run--they won't be around for that much longer!
>
> Like it or not (and I personally hate DRM), digital content downloaded under license is the way forward, and in the future it will become increasingly difficult to obtain books, music, or video in any other way. It's the future and we have to learn to live with it.

5000+ years later we are still wiriting on stone tablets. The format hasn't changed. Take a stone. Take a chisel.....

Same for books- ink, paper/vellum. Later, printed letters- and that's been around for seveal hundred years. Accessible, portable, and the only requisite is that A) the reader can actually read and B) there is light to read by. I think the point has already been made that everyone can hget a books, regardless of power requirements and technology- eg tribesman in a desert.

Digital simply isn't reliable or universal enough- and it has been around long enough by now, surely for it to be so?

Agreed. A book maintains itself and needs no additional technology to read (except for a pair of glasses in my case). It can be given to my children when I shuffle off.
I think maintaining electronic file based media for 10, 20 or 50 years will turn out to be a nightmare as we update our hardware; as formats change and vendors go bust or change their systems.
I'm very happy with paper books thanks. I also have a large collection of vinyl so I guess that makes me a bit of a dinosaur.

in the future it will become increasingly difficult to obtain books, music, or video in any other way. It's the future and we have to learn to live with it.

and we we all have our own personal flying cars and take holidays on Mars.

Trouble is when it comes to the crunch you can't beat a book.
a) instantly readable, no batteries or glitchy electronics to go wrong
b) more damage resistant than any electronic version so far. I could drop a book from the top of my house into a pond and though damaged I would still be able to read it.
c) Future resistant: I regularly read books that are more than 100 years old. I can not even access computer files from 10 years ago.
d) books look good
e) easier to flick through. I have tried electronic versions of travel guides and they are a nightmare to use because I tend to flip between chapters and there is no easy way to do that on the Kindle.

On the positive side for electronic books
a) compact I can carry several libraries worth around on holiday (providing I am somewhere with a power source)
b) I can make back ups which in the short term means I can get a book back if I lose it.
c) easier to search for a word or phrase.

So for the moment at least books still win out and still have a market

In reply to Duncan Bourne: Agreed. Worth noting that nobody on this thread is complaining about a paper book that cracked/shorted out/froze or otherwise needed to be replaced under warranty! There is definitely a place for e-readers but books will still be around for many years to come.

> (In reply to Duncan Bourne) Agreed. Worth noting that nobody on this thread is complaining about a paper book that cracked/shorted out/froze or otherwise needed to be replaced under warranty!

well i have had books fall to pieces on me but didnt get offered a warranty for it. Also managed to accidently trash a box full i needed to stick in the attic for space reasons.
Dont have that issue with a Kindle.

> So for the moment at least books still win out and still have a market

What you fail to take into account is price and market forces. Ebooks are generally cheaper than traditional books, and are being *hugely* pushed by the various vested interests in a way that regular books have not for many years (since there is so much money to be made). This is why I believe ebooks will win--although I agree that there will always be a place for printed books, even if they eventually become niche items.

In reply to Neil Williams: Do you find reading pdfs on your kindle good? So much of my work seems to be reading pdf documents these days, and often I print them, but a kindle that could take hundreds of them doesn't seem a bad idea.

I use the Kindle app on an iPad which makes it reasonable because you can scroll and zoom easily. I would think it would be less good on a normal Kindle because you can't and most PDFs are formatted to A4.

In reply to Neil Williams: Like Toby, I need to read a lot of PDFs & tend to print them so I can read them on the train, how well does a Kindle (or other ebook reader) cope with photos, graphics, tables, etc ?

the e-ink variants vary. The graphics can be pretty damn good but they need specifically optimising.
If i were you I would look at either the Kindle fire variants or Nexus7. Running on android and with normal screens they handle pdfs a lot better (although i prefer e-ink for a book)

I had my Kindle break on me after about two years (battery stopped taking charge). Got a replacement, this time with 3G, no questions asked, for £35. Pretty amazing service, I thought.

The Kindle has revolutionised my reading habits. I take it on holiday with a massive library that would have been unthinkable 'on paper'. I use the Kindle app on my iphone, ipad and anything else I happen to have handy whenever I find myself with an unexpected few spare minutes on a train or a bus if I don't have the actual Kindle with me. Reading progress seamlessly synced across every kindle device or app you have.

I think the general idea is that the lower end Kindle devices themselves (which keep getting cheaper and cheaper) are essentially disposable views into your virtual library collection.

> (In reply to Duncan Bourne)
>
> [...]
>
> What you fail to take into account is price and market forces. Ebooks are generally cheaper than traditional books, and are being *hugely* pushed by the various vested interests in a way that regular books have not for many years (since there is so much money to be made). This is why I believe ebooks will win--although I agree that there will always be a place for printed books, even if they eventually become niche items.

Well not necessarily, True some are available for pennies or less, but I haven't noticed a huge price difference in new books. I think that ebooks will certainly figure large in certain markets. It is easy for individual authors to get a book published on Kindle and the mass market holiday book trade is bound to figure large. I believe though that there will still be a market for hardback books, if only as statements of ownership to sit on a shelf, Illustrated books, guide books (at least until the problems of flipping through, and how one deals with an expensive electronic device over the sea say have been dealt).
It will be interesting to see what happens as I see them as delivering different strengths and weaknesses